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Huge FPS Issues Recently

I’m posting this hoping for any ideas and / or suggestions to help fix my graphical issues in LOTRO. I stopped playing for a bit around a month ago and everything was fine. I could do anything single-player or 3/6 in Ultra with all the bell’s and whistles without any noticeable issue. Almost any 12 man instance I could run easily in Medium or better. The only exceptions were Fear Wing T2 and BoE with the fire. For these, I would generally crank it down to low just to minimize issues. After coming back this weekend, this is not nearly the case.

It started this Friday when we decided to run OD. Initial wing went fine with no issues noticed. We downed that and moved on to Fear. This one has always run a bit laggy for me, so I didn't think anything about it when I was lagging a bit on the trash pulls. When we got to Durin’s Bane, it got much, much worse. The first pull or two was laggy, but ok. It quickly went downhill to the point that I was running on an invisible treadmill, flying through the platform when thrown, and basically being able to not do much of anything. It had been so long since I had had any frame rate issues that I couldn't remember how to pop up the meter so I didn't get what my FPS was. My connection was registering 40-50 ms and 0 loss. The lag made it absolutely unplayable. This was on Very Low.

It would only get worse the following night on Saturday, again on Very Low. We decided to run Helegrod on this occasion. The lag was bad enough that I could barely move for most of the boss fights, and the trash pulls were hardly much better. Then the absolute worst came on Dragon Wing. Before the fight I found the command to turn the FPS meter to see what I was getting. During Drugoth, my frames never went over about 18. If that wasn’t bad enough, it would only get worse once the Dragon came to play. At this point, it bottomed out between 2 and 6 FPS. I could literally do nothing. I lagged so badly that when the leader said “well done” when the dragon died, he still showed between 4-500K health on my screen. He had time to roll out the loot and I had time to have a tell conversation with him before the dragon went down. There was no lag on the in-game voice comms. Connection again registered as 40-50 ms and 0 loss.

My landscape FPS is down as well. On Ultra, it never goes above 20 and regularly ranges from 8 – 18 generally. If memory serves it used to regularly be 40+ and would dip to about 30 in-town. Now I can sit still on my horse in the countryside and it sits at ~21. Even on Very Low never goes above 26 and ranges from 11 – 22 mostly. I mostly play for group content and raiding particularly, so this makes it rather frustrating. My frames seem to be fine in all the other games I play including strat titles with lots of graphical eye candy, particles, etc.

My pertinent comp specs are as follows:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400

8GB Corsair Ram

ATI Radeon HD 5850 2GB Ram

Troubleshooting steps I’ve tried:

Reset router

Unloaded all plug-ins

Checked temp meter (36C)

Changed DX version in-game from DX 11 to DX 10 to DX9

Did a full uninstall and re-install of newest video drivers

Did a full uninstall, re-download, and install of High Res Client

Prayed, did a ritualistic dance, and broke out other various charms, incense, and such

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d really appreciate it. Always willing to augment what I’ve described and/or info I have given if it would help pinpoint a resolution. Thanks in advance!

I doubt problem is your end unless your system suffered some major problem lately (choking on dust, overheating, lightning, swamped by big processes running in the background). Your setup should run anything that LOTRO can throw at it. I had a BFE where everything simply froze, apparently from an overdose of effects or something like that - but old stuff always ran w/o problems up until past couple of weeks. I had strange lags that appear hardware related even in the most simple content.

Yeah, no major problems recently. I keep background stuff to a minimum, and there was plenty of free RAM. I clean it out regularly and have had nothing else major happen. Only game that has issues seems to be LOTRO.

Yeah, no major problems recently. I keep background stuff to a minimum, and there was plenty of free RAM. I clean it out regularly and have had nothing else major happen. Only game that has issues seems to be LOTRO.

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d really appreciate it. Always willing to augment what I’ve described and/or info I have given if it would help pinpoint a resolution. Thanks in advance!

Have you changed your screen resolution lately? Is the card acting in the native screen resolution?

Best initial suggestion I can give is to follow the sticky for how to get help in the technical forum. Few people ever do, which leads to a lot of guesswork by folks trying to help. All the below are guesses

Also, follow the connection sticky, just in case, especially since you reinstalled lotro. Even after just an update you may find your firewall/virus/internet provider software needs to have the client or launcher taken out and added back. Did you add all the ports?

Consider taking out your video card and looking for dust and reseat. I think you said you checked the temp though.

Check your video card software settings (CCC?) to make sure you have it set for maximum performance. Nvidia has a setting called "prefer maximum performance", but I'm not familiar with yours. Is hardware acceleration set to full?

Try turning "sync to refresh rate" off and back on a few times and monitor the effect on your FPS. It's fun to watch. Kind of like playing with a cat and a fishing pole with a catnip mouse tied on the end.

Try exchanging out for another video card, if you have one laying around.

Make sure something hasn't given LOTRO a low run priority somehow.

Try grouping with someone else. Maybe the screen-matching has slowed you down because someone in your usual group, or nearby, has connection speed issues. That should affect everyone nearby, if at all, but if in doubt, leave the slow ones behind - that's what the wargs are for.

Try a clean reinstall of any logitech product drivers (or anything else, for that matter).

Did you use auslogics or some program to defrag before you reinstalled LOTRO? (not on an SSD)

Did you use ccleaner to clean, malwarebytes to look for malware and your virus program before you defragged?

Buy an ssd and install lotro on one partition and the os on the other if you feel like it one weekend. It usually helps. That wasn't really answering your question. I just wanted to give out a plug for SSDs.

Unfortunately, after the patch it looks even worse. In open-world, I never went over 15 FPS, and was often in the single digits. Not good at all.

@ Emyr

Thank you for your suggestions!

I have verified that it is allowed in my AV. I will try taking out and re-adding, as well as making sure all necessary ports are open/allowed. I assume this info would be the stickies referenced.

I do use CC and Malware. I will however run fresh scans and see if it picks up anything.

I have been running on an SSD for the last couple months. Have my OS on one partition and my most played games on another. For informations sake, it is an OCZ Vertex 4.

I use almost exclusively Logitech products. I will have to try re-installing those.

Have not changed res's recently, always run in 1920x1080

Will give sync to refresh rate a whirl as well. My cats would love that, hehe.

As far as priority goes, normally have it set to normal. I have tried other settings up to real-time.

Believe I will try re-seating card and RAM. Not much hope for that working tho, since all other programs and games are running just fine. Have an old Nvidia 7600 laying around somewhere. If I get better frames on that I have a major issue, lol. All card settings are on max performance or allow software to choose options. May also give Memtest a whirl just in case, but since I'm not crashing or having problems with other games, I doubt faulty RAM is a likely culprit.

I honestly did not take a look at the stickies, and will do so. Would of course be happy to post a dxdiag if that would help and anything else.

Thanks again for the suggestions. Thought I had covered much of the pertinent info, but a lot of things I do / check without thinking about it because it's kinda second nature in the troubleshooting process.

Go with sync to refresh rate. It used to be that you got the best framerate without it. But lately some video drivers go nuts without sync turned on. They grab all the cpu cycles and try to grab more and more overloading systems trying to render more and faster framerates. They actually slow everything down. I Don't know if this is due to the video drivers or bad coding on Turbine's part.

You might also want to double check that something isn't kicking in to disturb the environment, like the neighbor using your internet, or download software, or update checkers, or scheduled virus scans or even windows update.
Uninstall Happy Cloud/Pando/etc. or anything similar, if they are still around.
ED: REF: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...eeeeeeaaaaaap!

You could also try gamebooster or some program that cuts off unneeded services.

Also, try renaming your userpreferences.ini file to userpreferences_old.ini or something like that and see if that has any effect.

There might be something down in the middle of this thread that will reference something that will point in the right direction.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I really appreciate it. Still chugging along at an abysmal frame rates unfortunately. Tried the sync to refresh rate fix and other suggestions in this thread with no luck. In the hopes it will help, I am posting my dxdiag:

A little bit more information gleaned since I posted the dxdiag. The problem vanishes completely when I enter interior locations i.e. vault, feasting hall, etc. Saw spikes as high as 100 fps and in general it stayed consistently between 55-65 fps. Tried multiple different areas Wildermore, Bree, Thorins Hall, etc and this remained consistent throughout. Great fps in interior location, and slowed to a crawl in exterior ones. Not sure what to make of it, but thought I would mention it.

I've been watching this thread as I recently got a new video card and my fps was way below expectations and I was hoping some great idea would come thru here.

I went thru the guides and nothing seemed to really help; I kept my kinmates up to 2 AM trying to help me, but we finally left it that i would uninstall and re-install lotro.

After I started the re-install, I headed over to the EVGA forums (I have an Nvidia card) and found some things to try, and now my fps is zipping along 3x better than what it was before - I'm very happy, tho I'll have to see how it performs in battle.

So, OP, since you have ATI I can't necessarily tell you that what I did will work for you, but I encourage you to find a support forum or call the manufacturer for help.

P.S. For anyone with Nvidia that wants to know:

Let try re install Nvidia Driver again with a clean install!
Shut down EVGA Precision X and do run Uninstall and save no to not save Profiles then reboot Windows!
Please check any left over EVGA Precision X folder in Windows Programs Files if so do delete the folder manual and Run CCleaner to select both cleaner and Registry!
Let start download install Latest Nvidia Driver 320.49 WHQL [ed- current driver of your choice] for 64bits or 32bits (Don't know what OS are you using now and If you prefer BETA then do download) please do choose "Custom Installation options" and please tick a box for Graphic Driver and PhysX ONLY!!! do not install Ge force Experience (that may cause your game drop FPS), HD Audio and for 3D Software if you are not in use then don't install!!! Finally please tick in the box for a perform a clean installation. Let install complete then please do re boot windows again once!
Then you can carry on install EVGA Precision X and try test! Hope it good to go!

In short, don't have Precision running, or even installed, when installing new nvidia drivers.

P.P.S. Other things I learned in reading the forums, Microsoft patch KB2670838 seems to give some people problems; this is a requirement yet for IE 10, but not needed if you aren't running IE10, so it can be uninstalled. This is obviously grasping at straws, but if you've done everything else, why not remove it?

P.P.P.S Kinmate is of the opinion that you should use "Detect Optimal Settings" as having the card run at other than spec actually causes more work for the card. Decide for yourself; this assumes that Anti-aliasing and Post Processing can still be turned off for a performance boost.

P.P.S. Other things I learned in reading the forums, Microsoft patch KB2670838 seems to give some people problems; this is a requirement yet for IE 10, but not needed if you aren't running IE10, so it can be uninstalled. This is obviously grasping at straws, but if you've done everything else, why not remove it?

I can't thank you enough! I had tried everything and was honestly about to give up. This fixed my issue. I am now getting an avg of 50-60 FPS on the landscape, with drops to ~40 and spikes to ~70. Right about where it was before I took a break. I'll have to note the name of that update and make sure I don't accidentally re-install. I'm stoked that I can get back to raiding with my kin and getting ready for HD to drop. Thanks again dude, much appreciated!

I can't thank you enough! I had tried everything and was honestly about to give up. This fixed my issue. I am now getting an avg of 50-60 FPS on the landscape, with drops to ~40 and spikes to ~70. Right about where it was before I took a break. I'll have to note the name of that update and make sure I don't accidentally re-install. I'm stoked that I can get back to raiding with my kin and getting ready for HD to drop. Thanks again dude, much appreciated!

Wow, I thought it really was a shot in the dark. Glad to hear it resolved your issues.

If you right click on the update in the list of the Windows updates, select Hide Update and it won't be displayed in your list anymore.

A little bit more information gleaned since I posted the dxdiag. The problem vanishes completely when I enter interior locations i.e. vault, feasting hall, etc. Saw spikes as high as 100 fps and in general it stayed consistently between 55-65 fps. Tried multiple different areas Wildermore, Bree, Thorins Hall, etc and this remained consistent throughout. Great fps in interior location, and slowed to a crawl in exterior ones. Not sure what to make of it, but thought I would mention it.

I've also been fighting with lower than expected FPS and the OP's saga sounds very much like mine. Uninstalling that particular Windows update seems to have helped me as well! Not as significantly as the OP, though. I have a Radeon HD 6850 with 1GB VRAM, and my system has 16GB RAM. CPU is 3GHz quad-core. I have my settings at a combination of high and very high settings with all shadows disabled and I get between 30-40 FPS standing still in Cliving (Rohan), it can go up to 50-60 if I face toward a building so there's nothing in the distance to draw. When I'm moving around in Cliving, it drops to roughly 20 FPS. It used to drop to about 8 FPS, so although 20 isn't great it's a noticeable improvement.

I still feel like something is wrong, though. It seems like with my video card I should be able to crank settings up much higher (ultra?) and not have to disable the fancy stuff like post-processing. But this is much more tolerable, at least.

I have a nagging feeling that Rohan might be more problematic for my system than earlier areas, but I haven't bothered to travel elsewhere.

I would think consistent ultra is more for the 660 tier and higher, but it would probably depend on how you play. (PvMP, etc.) Maybe someone who has a 660 could answer that.

You could look through this thread for links to places that have performance tips.

You could also consider turning off virtual memory or at least adding an ssd, if none exists. Even an ssd is much slower than ram, if you have enough, which 16 should be.

(It's often better to make your own thread and post according to the sticky or at least give a little more of the basic info.)

anti aliasing is off and everything set to high performance in the control center and your windows power saving settings?

Are your cores parking? Here's an example, although I think there are other easier ways to do this now. Back up your registry through regedit first of course. Make sure you backup ALL. File-export w/(export range = all)

(I am not a doctor and I can not give medical advice, so if you mess up your computer's registry, don't come looking for me.)

Wanted to follow up with more info on removing the Evil Update. When I uninstalled it, my Internet Explorer was automatically downgraded to version 9. It didn't warn me of this, it just did it. I reinstalled IE11 and it said "installing required updates" which does include the Evil Update. However, the update doesn't seem to affect my LotRO framerates anymore. So now it's just an update, not an evil one. I'm guessing this might be because I upgraded to the latest video driver before the Evil Update got uninstalled/reinstalled.

I followed many of the tweaks mentioned in the post above, and others, but NONE of them had a significant impact on framerates until I dealt with the Evil Update. Doing that seems to have "unlocked" the ability of other tweaks to be effective. I now get around 50-60 fps on the landscape, although this seems to routinely drop to 20-25 if I'm in a large town such as Snowbourne. My settings are mostly on High, although I've bumped a few things to Very High and I have antialiasing at 8x.

I still have significant stuttering which is impossible to ignore, I'm convinced that getting SSD and reinstalling LotRO there is the only resolution to that (I've tried disabling AllowFakeFullScreen and other suggested fixes). I've seen the game running on SSD and while it does still have hitches, it is reduced to the point of being trivial and easily ignored.

I ran around Snowbourne some, with both 8x antialiasing and with it disabled completely. There was no noticeable change in FPS, which surprised me...I was sure disabled would be better. I was getting around 40-45 FPS when standing still, but when riding around on my horse it fluctuated wildly from 20-40, sometimes spiking a little lower.

I finally resolved my problem and just wanted to post my solution here in case it helps somebody else in the future.

I discovered that my CPU temperature was alarmingly hot--90C when sitting idle. I opened up my case and discovered that the built-in bracket for my liquid cooling system was completely broken on one end. This meant that the heat sink was only conecting to the CPU on one edge, and the rest of it was jutting into the air. In other words, I had no CPU cooling whatsover! I replaced the CPU cooling system and my temperature plummeted to the "normal" numbers I found people describing online.

I logged into LotRO to check my framerates. With settings that used to give me 35-40 fps, I was now getting 85-90 fps!

So the moral of the story is to check CPU temperature if nothing else seems to be helping. Your CPU might be throttling itself down in order to avoid heat damage. Windows doesn't really provide a view into your CPU temp so you have to download one of many different utilities available on the web, such as Core Temp. From what I gathered online, a "normal" temperature should be somewhere around 15-20C when sitting idle, and maybe around 50-55C under full load like while playing a game.